Videogames have aspired to be 'like films' for as long as I've played them. Back in the early 90s, Hollywood movies were exciting, sexy, glamorous, culturally accepted-everything that videogames weren't. A lot has changed since then, of course, with videogaming staking a strong claim as the mode of entertainment of choice of the noughties, for part of the populace at least. Yet, for all the progress videogames have made at winning the hearts and minds of modern media-saturated audiences, many in the industry still have one eye cocked at the multiplexes, wistfully watching on in jealousy. And whilst I've always found this penchant a little tiresome, Heavy Rain is, by my estimation at least, the climax of the quest that began in 1983 with the seminal Dragon's Lair- at least until the next one. It's legacy to gaming, however, is not entirely straightforward. I came away from a recent Heavy Rain preview event in Dublin simultaneously enthused for Quantic Dream's presentational flair and genuine commitment to overcoming the inherent incompatibilities between games and non-interactive narrative media, whilst being concerned about the apparent reliance on quick time events as a proxy for 'genuine' player control. A playthrough of the completed version hasn't fundamentally changed that original ...

The Winter Olympics may just be numerous different ways of sliding, but there’s a surprising amount of variety in the sports on offer.  It’s a shame then, that the fourteen events included in Vancouver 2010 are limited to nine kinds of skiing and snowboarding, with a bit of sledding and skating thrown in for good measure.  The controls are tight, generally straying away from the button mashing of previous Olympic titles, and the inclusion of a first person camera for most events is a nice touch, especially with the high quality of the visuals.  But with no career mode, everything feels disappointingly disconnected, completely losing the excitement of the real thing.

My game-saturated teenage mind once drew Dante’s vision of Hell in much the same way as Visceral do. Maybe I saw less cocks, tits, and unbaptised babies with knife limbs, but the huge scale, moaning residents, and rivers of various bodily fluids all made the transition. God of War of Hell it may be, but that doesn’t mean that handling Death’s rather flexible spinal-scythe isn’t a satisfying experience. The bleakness threatens to overwhelm but somehow doesn’t; it’s never scary, just faintly ridiculous. Dante’s Inferno may well defecate on the source material but at least it doesn’t show any shame about it.

Any game which sees you control one of six impossibly camp musclebound bodybuilders (or a polar bear) as you tear through buildings in chase of a protein supplement thief has to have something going for it. Yet, whilst the  concept raises a chuckle or ten, and the PlayStation-era graphics are so bad they're good, the awful motion-based gestural controls cannot be similarly exonerated, such is the inconsistency of the recognition. It's a damn shame, too, because it's enough to turn Muscle March from a rather good joke to a bad one, and will leave you looking in vain for WiiWare's 'refund' button.

Developers Firemint have produced many licensed mobile games, but it’s their original title Flight Control that has been their most successful, selling over 2 million copies. The aim is to match as many colour-coded aeroplanes and helicopters with their corresponding landing zone by drawing a path with your finger. The difficultly level gradually increases until the game ends when 2 ill-fated aircraft collide. There is also a multiplayer mode which has good potential, but one player always has far more traffic to direct than the other. With a mixture of fast and slow moving crafts on a variety of maps, Flight Control gives your fingers plenty to do trying to control the inevitable mayhem in store.

Desperate Struggle addresses its predecessor’s flaws and suffers for it. Players still button-mash through colorful brawls, but roadblocks that stood in the way have been eliminated despite the excellent pacing they provided. The empty city of Santa Destroy is now a slow-loading map, and jobs are no longer interesting commentaries on motion control but cheap cash-ins on the current retro craze. Grasshopper missed the point with Desperate Struggle by delivering a sequel that assumed players enjoyed No More Heroes for its gameplay and not its unique commentary.